Fine dining at Lake Powell Resort

LAKE POWELL - A vacation here is all about being close to nature, and it makes you think about preserving it.

Brandon Shubert, chef at the Rainbow Room, the high-end restaurant at the Lake Powell Resort, thinks about it, too.

"I'm concentrating on using sustainable food, using products that are not in danger of being lost to future generations, and buying as local as I can in the middle of the desert," says Shubert, in his fifth season at the resort.

He says that involves asking a lot of questions of his suppliers. "I don't want produce out of Guam if I can get it from California."

Shubert gets some specialty items, such as spice blends and prickly-pear syrup, locally. Most of the rest comes from Phoenix, Tucson, Yuma and Southern California.

The Rainbow Room's menu has tourist-friendly fare such as salmon, steaks and pasta touched up with Southwestern influences. "We're still a meat-and-potatoes country," Shubert says. The beef he buys is all natural, with no hormones. "It took awhile to source that, but I finally did."

Even though Lake Powell is in the desert, vacationers are on the water and they expect seafood, so there are several fish and shellfish dishes on the menu. The wild-caught Alaskan salmon and Pacific halibut are among diners' favorites. Shubert follows the Monterey Bay (Calif.) Aquarium seafood "watch list," which rates fish choices according to how abundant, well-managed and fished or farmed in environmentally friendly ways they are.

"Chilean sea bass is one of the best fishes ever, and you can't screw it up. That's why it was overfished," he laments. "It's coming back, and when it's back on the 'best choices' list, I'll get it."

For diners who are more adventurous, Shubert offers his "Chef's Table," a four-course dinner that he and his staff choose.

"It's a time for me and the chefs to have fun," he says. "We can show off with special presentations. There's a lot of pulled sugar and chocolate work."

This is the second season he's offered the table. Last summer, he prepared seared scallops in an heirloom corn pudding and a cinnamon-chile-rubbed tenderloin of elk with an Arizona Cabernet reduction. Sample menus for this season include citrus-crusted wild salmon on ancho chile polenta with baked Alaska beehives with strawberry coulis, and wild mushroom-stuffed quail with roasted shallot mashed potatoes and a fresh melon Bavarian.